Nude-free Playboy magazine makes its Google Play Store debut

Playboy has finally released the digital edition of its 63-year old print magazine. It can now be bought in the Google Play Store. Buyers can pick up a subscription to the digital edition for $17.99 a year, or they can choose to purchase individual issues for $5.99 each.

Playboy has been trying its best to reinvent itself as more of a men’s mainstream media property in the past few years, thanks in part to the internet making it much easier to find photos of naked ladies. As a result, the magazine’s print subscription has dwindled down to less than 600,000 readers, versus its peak of 5.6 million in the mid-1970s.

As part of this change to the mainstream, the magazine recently made the once unthinkable move of ditching nude pictures as part of the classic pictorials of its monthly Playmates, although the photos are still very racy. That likely allowed the magazine to make its long awaited way to the Google Play Store, which does not allow magazines that are considered to be pornography to be sold in its Newsstand section.

Playboy is using the ZINIO Pro platform to publish the digital edition, starting with its October 2016 issue. If you decide to download the Playboy magazine app this month, you will also get access to the previous six print issues for free, starting with the first non-nude edition which was released in March 2016.

While Playboy may have just launched the digital edition of its traditional print magazine, it already has two mobile apps in the Google Play Store. One is Playboy Now, which is a companion to its website. The other is Playboy Classic, which includes articles and nude-free pictorials of its older Playmate pictorials from its long history.

What do you think about Playboy’s magazine becoming available in the Google Play Store? Would you buy a subscription “just for the articles?”